Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth

I loved the book but I read it while I was attending a University as a student. I wouldn't recommend this outside of the classroom. It's a great book to discuss and dissect with other scholars. If you are looking for just some interesting to read... it starts off great but then the court cases might get a little dull. If you are into scholarly work and research then you'll love it.

Other reviewers have aptly summarized this book, touting its main value, a succinct summary of the developing censorship of 'offensive' media. I, for one, am disappointed that this book never looks beyond the legal realm to which its study is confined. Simply stated, the book sadly fails to explain why all the fuss? If we accept the thesis, underwhelming at best, that little evidence justifies the government's intrusions made under the banner of protecting the children, no effort is made to explain why this tactic is so pervasive or persuasive. When the government protects, who exactly is being protected, from what, and why?

This book is a responsible and important study of how we rationalize censorship policies to "protect" children. The interests at stake here are as obvious as they are important. The freedom of expression has long been considered the touchstone of individual liberty and, in turn, democracy. Legally, we have enacted many safeguards to protect this essential aspect of our society, and continue to give mouth service to its importance. But, even as we tout the importance of such personal freedoms, both overseas and on American soil, we are sadly failing in one critical respect: we are not instilling these values in our children. Instead, we are showing them that an authoritative regime may censor and punish unpopular or offensive speech in the name of safety and conformity. We lecture students over the values of the freedom of speech while allowing schools inappropriately broad latitude in declaring student behavior inappropriate or dangerous if it even references violent or sexual themes. Anything considered "sexual" in nature is censored from school life entirely, and even sexual education classes suffer in their ability to inform and protect students. What are teenagers learning about the importance of personal freedom when they see their peers suspended, expelled, and even imprisoned, for their artistic expressions? Students can legitimately complain that many primary and secondary schools unnecessarily subject them to enforced orthodoxy and repressive strictures, particularly in regards to sexual and violent imagry. I agree with the author that this paternalistic censorship harms children in many ways, and her discussion of the "modeling effects" and the teaching of authoritarianism should not be dismissed lightly. I can see how this book may be a slightly difficult read for those who haven't been to law school or haven't studied this subject matter previously, but it is worth the effort. You don't have to be lawyer to understand it, and perhaps the most importance audience for this book isn't.

Though the scholarly discussions of legal cases were trying (pardon the pun) to get through, they were worth the effort. They helped to dramatize the incredible amounts of time, energy, and emotion misplaced in the "harm to minors" protectionism racket. Due to her civil libertarian background, I was surprised to see her frequent attempts to present (or at least understand) both sides. She points out that censorship itself may have "modeling effects, teaching authoritarianism, intolerance for unpopular opions, erotophobia, and sexual guilt." In her conclusion, she comes utterly to the point: "Censorship is an avoidance technique that addresses adult anxieties and satisfies symbolic concerns, but ultimately does nothing to resolve social problems or affirmatively help adolescents and children cope with their environments and impulses."She revisits the virtues (for all of us, including children) of ambiguity, catharsis, and irony and says that the humorless overliteralism of so much censorship directed at youth "reduces the difficult, complicated, joyous, and sometimes tortured experience of growing up to a sanitized combination of adult moralizing and intellectual closed doors."

Bravo to this book. It's time that someone injected facts and logic into debates that primarily have been based on myths, fears, guesses, hopes, assumptions, and hysteria.A previous reviewer wants to know why we don't have more data on how, say, pornography affects teenagers. One reason is that a controlled experiment would be nearly impossible: finding teenagers who haven't been exposed to any pornography is difficult enough, but for a scientist or social scientist to get approval from human review boards for the other half of the experiment (the teenagers that you're going to make sure have been exposed to plenty of pornography, to study its supposed effects) would be nearly impossible. But as the previous reviewer points out, we have a vast profusion of anecdotal evidence: pornography is widely available in Europe, which seems to have fewer of the supposedly pornography-related problems than does the United States. Second, since almost all teenagers voluntarily expose themselves to pornography, it's safe to observe that the vast majority of them suffer from no effects. Who are we protecting with laws prohibiting minors from obtaining pornography? Parents who cannot and will not deal with the fact that their 12-year-old son is always horny and quite probably already is sexually (if not emotionally or intellectually) an adult?